by William Bell
“See this, Karen? Doesn’t look like supernatural mud to me.”
He sat down on the rail of my unmade waterbed and pulled the drawstrings slowly. I half expected him to reach in with his fingers and pull out a red, white and blue rubber ball.
“Come on and take a look.”
I sat on the chair at my desk. “No thanks. I’ll sit here. You can give me a report.”
John started talking in his I’m Going to Teach You Something voice. “This leather is really soft. It’s probably deerskin. You can tell from the light colour.”
He hooked his two thumbs inside the neck of the bag and stretched it as wide as he could. Using his thumb and finger as a tweezer he reached inside.
And pulled out a small curved tooth. It was yellowed with age and it looked like it came from a small dog.
He put the tooth down on the sheet beside him.
He stuck his thumb and finger inside again.
And pulled out another tooth, the same colour but sort of square, with roots shaped like fingers.
I realized I had been holding my breath and started breathing normally. This was no big deal, it looked like.
“So far, it’s yawn time,” John commented.
In went the tweezer, out came a piece of reddish-brown stuff shaped like a small triangle. “What’s that?”
“I don’t know,” he answered, just as the thing slipped from his hand. It floated to the floor. John picked it up again, carefully.
“It might be … yes! See the hairs! It’s a piece of skin. Wait! It’s an ear!”
“Ugh. What kind of ear?”
“Must be a small dog or something like that. Or maybe a fox.”
He put the ear beside the teeth and shoved his tweezer into the bag one more time.
John gave me a funny look. In his hand he was holding a bone. It was clean and yellowy-white. And very small. My curiosity won out and I got up and stepped over to John to look at it.
“Anything more in there?” I pointed to the bag that still rested in his palm.
John laid the bone down on the sheet, then upended the bag. A round gold object plopped onto the bed. It was about the size of a nickel, maybe a little bigger, but not as big as a quarter.
John picked it up and turned it over slowly, so many times I thought he’d gone nutty.
“Well?” I snapped.
“It’s a coin.”
“Brilliant deduction, Watson!” I burst out. “Let me see it!”
“Wonder if it’s gold,” John muttered as he handed it over. “Might be worth a lot.”
It sure looked like gold. It was really shiny and worn almost smooth. I could make out the remains of a face on one side, but couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman. The other side was so smooth I could see nothing except two numbers, a one and a seven.
“Look.” I showed John the numbers.
“Well,” he said, “the coin was minted in Something Seventeen or Seventeen Something.”
“Brilliant again,” I huffed. “As if I needed you to tell me that.”
“I’ll bet it was Seventeen Something,” he said, ignoring my words. “This coin sure looks at least two hundred years old.”
“Yeah. it does.”
He put the coin on the sheet, then lined up all the objects—two teeth, the piece of skeleton, the ear, and the coin—and laid the bag beside them.
Did they mean anything, I wondered. And if they did, did I want to know? I realized that half of me said Yes and the other half said, Put the junk back in the bag and toss it in the garbage and forget you ever went to Chiefs’ Island.
As if he was reading my mind John asked, “Well, what do you want to do with this stuff?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, if you don’t want it, can I have it? I’d like to go to the library and see if I can find out anything about little skin bags that Aboriginals used to wear around their waists.”
I almost said Yes. I looked down at the strange objects on my bed, and suddenly thought, Kenny would have loved all this stuff. I said in a low voice,
“No, I think I’ll keep it for a while.”
On my windowsill I had a big clear glass candy bowl with a lid. I dumped out the comb, barrettes, paperclips and other junk onto my desk and, using a comer of the blanket on my bed, I polished the bowl and lid. Then I carefully laid the deerskin bag, ear, teeth, coin, and bit of skeleton in the bowl. I put on the lid and carried the bowl to the windowsill, putting it down in the middle so it wouldn’t get knocked off when I opened or closed the side panes.
“There,” I said, and brushed my hands together.
Saturday Evening
That night I had a lot of trouble getting to sleep. I tossed and turned and punched my pillow and smoothed my blanket. I listened to the radio for a while with my earphones on, but that didn’t help either. Instead of calming me the way it usually does, the local rock station just bugged me.
Finally I tossed the earphones on the floor and drifted off. I don’t know how long I had slept before I came suddenly awake. It must have been the cold that woke me. I was freezing. I sat up in bed, pulling my blanket up around my ears. Outside my bay window the moonlight was like silver paint on the leaves. The wind chimes reflected the light and on the windowsill the glass bowl sort of glowed.
I didn’t know why, but my stomach was in a tight knot—the way it is when you’ve got an important test coming up, or you did something wrong and your parents found out and it’s time to get punished.
Then I realized I could see my breath.
It can’t be this cold, I thought. And if it was cold, how come the furnace didn’t start up? I decided to get out of bed and wake up Dad and get the heat turned on.
It was the sharp tinkling of the wind chimes that stopped me. I looked up at them, surprised, because I was sure I had shut my window.
My window was closed. The chimes were perfectly still, but jangling like mad.
The jangling stopped, and all I could hear was my own breathing. What the heck is going on, I thought.
Then I heard footsteps in the hall outside my room, creaking on the hardwood floor.
And a wave of fear rolled through me. Because I knew they weren’t footsteps belonging to Mom or Dad or John. There was someone in the house!
I was too scared to get out of bed. I sat there, tense, staring at my closed door, hoping that the footsteps wouldn’t come closer, hoping that the bolt would hold. I heard a sudden laugh, then the sound of someone running, toward the front of the house.
Then dead silence.
Still I stared at the door. I pulled the blanket tighter as my teeth began chattering—from fear or cold, I didn’t know which. I wanted to run to my parents’ room but I was too terrified to get out of bed. I glanced up at the wind chimes, half expecting them to jangle again, then back to the door.
I felt exhausted, heavy. I lay down again on my side with my legs curled up to my chest. I was beginning to feel a little warmer but I could still see my breath. I lay there, staring at the door.
Footsteps again. Creaking slowly toward my room.
The temperature dropped. I moaned in terror and cowered back until I could feel the wall behind me as the footsteps came even closer.
The footsteps stopped. Then—Bang! Bang! Bang!—the door shook in its frame. The clamour kept on without a rest, a constant knocking, like someone on the other side was mad, really mad, and wanted me.
The knocking got louder and louder. The whole wall seemed to vibrate with each deafening bang on the door. I pressed my hands to my ears, thinking I was going crazy. The pounding started to echo inside my skull, like a drum. I tore my eyes from the door when the motionless wind chimes began to jangle again.
My eyes darted to the slide bolt above the knob on the door. It rattled and jumped with each booming blow. I looked at the doorknob, expecting it to begin to turn, slowly, like in all the horror movies.
But the thunderous knocking stopped. The wind chimes
fell silent.
I flopped back on the bed, relieved, as if someone had pushed me over. I was breathing fast and a trickle of sweat ran into my eye. How can I be sweating, I thought. It’s still freezing in here. But I couldn’t see my breath anymore.
I felt the heaviness again, and fell into sleep.
When I opened my eyes, it was still night. Moonlight spilled through my window and across the floor. I was facing the door, and the knob shone a little from the moonlight.
I pushed my blanket down. It was very warm in the room.
“Whew! What a dream,” I whispered. “Must have been all that popcorn I ate before I went to bed.”
I had almost convinced myself that it had all been a nightmare when I heard footsteps again.
They crept slowly down the hall toward my room. They sounded different, but I was suddenly just as terrified as before. I cowered against the wall again.
The footsteps stopped at my door.
The doorknob turned slowly. But the bolt held.
“Karen?” John’s voice was quiet and scared.
“Jeeze, John! You scared the life out of me.” I was so relieved I couldn’t get mad at the idiot.
I climbed out of bed, slid the bolt back, and headed for the bed again.
John slipped into the room, leaving the door open, and came over to the bed and sat down. Right on my feet.
“Ow! You goof.”
“Shhhhhhh! Sorry.”
John glanced out into the dark hall, then turned back to me.
His face looked funny. Not ha-ha funny. Strange funny. It wasn’t the I’ve Got Everything Under Control brother I was used to. He looked scared and … confused. Like something really blew his mind
“Did … did you hear anything tonight, Karen?”
I was suddenly scared again. “Like what?”
“You did, didn’t you?” he said excitedly. “You did hear something. I can tell by your voice.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, John. You come in here in the middle of the night and scare me out of my—”
“Okay, I’ll tell you what I heard. You tell me if you heard it too. Okay?” I didn’t say anything. I didn’t like this at all.
“Footsteps, right? Not yours, not Mom’s or Dad’s.”
He stopped talking, searching my face. Then he went on.
“Running, and … and a laugh. Then someone knocking on a door somewhere.”
He kept looking straight into my eyes. I still said nothing. I was scared. And mad. I had persuaded myself that what had happened had been a dream. Now here was my real-life brother telling me he had heard everything too. I couldn’t kid myself anymore.
“It was my door,” I admitted.
John’s eyes bugged out. “What? Really? Weren’t you scared?”
“No, I was thrilled. I invited whoever it was to come in and play checkers. Of course I was scared, you winkie!”
John let out a long breath.
“You left out one thing, John. It was cold. Really cold.”
“Yeah, I felt it, too.” His eyes grew even larger.
“Just like—”
“That’s right,” I cut in, “just like on Chiefs’ Island.”
DAY
THREE
Sunday Morning
John and I didn’t sleep the rest of that night. We sat on the bed talking, jumping like terrified cats at every noise in the house, making all kinds of guesses about what had happened.
After he had calmed down, which was just about the time sunlight began to creep in my window, John started ticking off his fingers.
“Okay. So far, we’ve got two possible explanations. One, someone broke into the house and—”
“Baloney,” I cut in. We’d been through all this before. “As if a burglar is going to run around laughing and pounding on doors. And what did he do, bring a portable air conditioner? Why don’t you just face it, John? It—”
It was his turn to interrupt. “TWO!” he almost shouted. “There’s something, uh, preternatural going on.”
“Something what?”
I could tell he was starting to feel like his old self again. His Lecturing Voice slipped into gear. Except he didn’t look too scholarly with messy blonde hair sticking up in all directions, braces, and green pajamas with bright red stop signs all over them.
“Preternatural. It means, uh, something we don’t have any explanation for—yet. Like, science can’t help too much.”
I thought about what my mom had said the morning before. She was a scientist.
John was still talking. “But someday we will.”
“Someday we will what?”
“Have an explanation.”
“Preternatural. Sounds like one of those words politicians use.”
John ignored me. He usually does when he’s lecturing. “Supernatural means that it’s … well, like gods and monsters and miracles.”
“And ghosts.”
He shrugged. Getting him to admit anything was like waiting for paint to dry.
“Yeah, okay, like ghosts.”
“Well, John, I’ll tell you what I think. What I know. We saw a ghost on Chiefs’ Island. And last night there was a ghost in this house. And somehow they must be connected.”
“Boy, your imagination is really ripping along!”
“Okay, what’s your explanation?” I was getting sick of talking around in circles.
“I told you. It’s preternatural.”
“That’s an explanation?”
John knew he was being stupid. His face told me so, no matter what his mouth said.
“Okay, let’s do this scientifically.”
I groaned and flopped backwards on the bed.
“We’ll ask Mom and Dad if they heard anything last night. Okay?”
I agreed.
“But no leading questions. Agreed?”
“What are you, a lawyer? Get out of here and let me get dressed,” I said. “I’ll meet you in the kitchen.”
When we got downstairs, wearing our bathing suits, Dad was sitting at the table, spooning cream of wheat into his mouth. There was a big steaming bowl of the awful stuff in front of him. He got up at dawn every morning, went for a run, and had a bowl of that sticky white stuff when he got back.
Winter or summer, always the same. “Hi, guys,” he said. “Want some?”
I wrinkled my nose. John said, “Not creative enough, Dad.” He got the bread out of the bread-box and popped two slices into the toaster. I put the kettle on the stove for more tea. The pot was almost empty.
John made a sandwich out of lettuce, honey, sliced ham and peanut butter and sat down between Dad and me.
“Hey, Dad,” he began, “I had a really funny dream last night.”
“Oh, tell me about it.”
Dad picked up the box of brown sugar and shook it over his bowl. Then he poured more milk in on top of the glue. He stirred the mess around. I suddenly realized where John got his loony eating habits.
John described a phony dream that was pretty close to what happened. Then he said, “It was really real, Dad, you know?”
“Yeah, sometimes dreams seem more real than real life.”
John wasn’t listening. “When I woke up, it seemed like I was still dreaming. I could hear noises.” He stopped chewing. “Dad, did you or Mom hear anything last night?”
“Like what, John?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” John was doing a terrible job of trying to sound casual. “Like footsteps or someone knocking on a door?”
“Nope, not a thing.”
“Did it get cold last night?” I put in. John shot me a dirty look.
Dad laughed. “Cold? The guy on the radio a while ago said last night was twenty-five degrees. Supposed to be hot today too,” he added.
John gave me another snarl look. I smiled what I hoped was an I Told You So smile.
“There’s something I want to ask you guys, now that we’re together,” Dad said. “Who’s been into my
charcoal sticks? I found them scattered all over the drafting board when I went into the study this morning. I also found this.”
He reached into the chest pocket of his shirt and took out a piece of paper. He unfolded it and put it down on the table beside his bowl.
On the paper was this:
“I don’t get it, Dad,” said John, chewing. “What’s the big deal? It’s just some scribbles.” He looked into Dad’s face. “Isn’t it?”
He looked at me. “Sure. There’s no big deal. Except one of you has been at my table, using my stuff, which you’re welcome to do, as you know, provided you don’t leave a mess.”
I knew he was thinking about the time about two years ago, after Kenny died, when I went a little nutty and filled page after page of his drafting paper with crazy charcoal scribbles. I spent the next day in bed, drinking hot milk. Mom stayed home from work and fussed over me all day.
“Don’t look at me, Dad,” I said. “I haven’t touched your stuff.”
“Me either,” said John.
My Dad got one of those I’m Disappointed in You looks on his face, the kind parents are really good at. I guess he decided not to make an issue out of it, because he just nodded.
“Well, all right. Anyway, how about some lawn mowing today, guys?”
John groaned. “Aw, Dad, can’t we do it tomorrow?”
“Nope.”
Dad got up and put his empty bowl in the dishwasher. Then he padded off to his study. His leather sandals slapped away down the hall.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Are you still going with the ghost theory?”
We had finished mowing and raking the lawns and had taken a swim to cool off. The yard smelled of fresh cut grass. Now we were lying side by side on the dock, facing the house instead of the lake.
“Yup,” I said. “And I’ve got an idea.”
“What?”
“I think we should go talk to Weird Noah.”
“No way. What for?”
“Come on, John, you know what for. You told me the guy knows everything there is to know about ghosts and vampires and miracles and all that stuff.”
